Temple Isaiah finds its cantor

Michele Marr

She embodies her brilliant voice and her voice embodies her rich

heritage in all its languages -- Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew and English. On

Friday night, Svetlana Portnyansky brought voice and heritage together at

her first Shabbat at Temple Isaiah in Newport Beach as the congregation’s

new, and permanent, ordained cantor.

“This is one of the greatest things ever to happen to Temple Isaiah,”

said Marc Steven Rubenstein, rabbi for the conservative synagogue. “It is

like we say at Hanukkah, ‘A great miracle happened here.’ We now have the

finest ingredients for a temple. We are like a precious gem here in

Orange County.”

Those ingredients, Rubenstein says, are a dedicated congregation with

longtime members like Flory and Felix Van Beek, who were instrumental in

bringing Portnyansky to the synagogue, and now Portnyansky herself.

“In our religion, all the prayers are chanted, so you really need a

cantor,” said Flory Van Beek, who is also a trained and degreed musician.

Van Beek has in years past directed the synagogue’s program of music

for the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, bringing in

singers from the Opera Pacific and elsewhere to fill eight parts -- two

soprano, two alto, two tenor and two bass -- for the Hebrew liturgy.

“I was very fortunate to have wonderful friends to help me,” she said.

Now Van Beek is pleased to turn the task over to Portnyansky. “We are

so blessed I cannot believe it that we have her. She is so very famous.”

Portnyansky is world-renowned. From Moscow to the Greek Theatre in Los

Angeles to Carnegie Hall and stages in Jerusalem, Montreal, Miami and

Rugusa, Italy -- as well as a long list of other cities -- she has

performed with some of the world’s best cantors, including Israel’s Dudu

Fisher, and such star performers as Maximillian Schell, Steve Allen and

Lionell Hampton.

She has appeared on television and, in 1996, when Steven Spielberg

created the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, she was

invited to sing on the soundtrack for his documentary film “Survivors of

the Holocaust.”

“The producers played the video for me, for I should be able to see

what’s going on during my singing. I was watching people remember their

mothers, their terrible days in the concentration camps. I couldn’t sing.

It was not necessary for me watching those videos. I feel it anyway. I

feel it very deeply,” Portnyansky said.

Portnyansky has a tireless resolve to sustain and build the life of

Russian Jewish communities throughout the world. She is a member of the

committee for the World Congress of Russian Jewry, and last week attended

its first meetings in Jerusalem and Moscow. She continues to perform

worldwide.

Portnyansky lived in Moscow and studied at the Moscow Conservatory of

Music. She first came to the United States in 1991 with a touring music

concert.

“I escaped Russia then. I didn’t see the future of Russia at all. It

was dangerous for Jews to live a Jewish life there. I left my family

there, then my family came to me,” she said.

It was in New York, at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America,

that she was finally able to study cantorial music, music that in Russia

she had heard only clandestinely on old records belonging to her mother

and father. As cantor at Temple Isaiah, Portnyansky hopes to bring

concerts -- along with the music for Shabbat and the High Holy Days -- to

the synagogue. She hopes they will attract more people, including other

Russian Jews who live in the area, to the synagogue and to a more active

Jewish life.

“The first time I was at Temple Isaiah, I liked those people,” she

said. “I want to be there, to be among them, to be a member of their warm

family. I want to be meaningful for them.”