I’m sorry I can’t be there in person, but still I can’t wait.” “I’m very excited about this opportunity on April 25. “Music is very powerful in inspiring people and building community and connecting Jews to their hearts and to their traditions,” says Cantor (please call me Azi) Schwartz. So, purchase a double chai ($36) ticket and settle back for an unforgettable concert and then live conversation that I am eager to moderate. Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah will be there, Lecha Dodi and other iconic pieces.” “We’ll cover some ground from the bimah to Broadway, from the traditional to the popular. In fact, all are encouraged to participate. But, it’s not necessary to be a Temple Israel member or area resident to view this incredible program. In fact, it got everyone’s attention that has seen that 2016 link.Īt the Temple Israel event, attendees will see and hear that now famous rendition of Adom Olam, and many more from the Cantor’s vast video archive during a virtual program, created exclusively for and hosted by Temple Israel in Norfolk. So, for instance, our adaptation of Adon Olam to I’ll be Back from Hamilton was a good way to get to young people’s hearts and gain their attention.” The whole point of Judaism is L’dor va Dor. We have a responsibility to appeal to their sensibilities. We support and cherish Jewish music like no other institution, and not just synagogue, anywhere in the world.”Ĭantor Schwartz has found a worldwide audience because his music, widely available on the internet, is, in his words, “meeting people where they are. “We are tasked today with honoring that heritage and continuing to push it and reinvent it. “It was that way before I was born, even before my grandfather was born,” he says. And so my wife, who was in medical school at the time, and our two children, moved to the United States.” She would return to Israel to complete her training to become a rheumatologist, and they would add two more to the family once they were back together again in America.Īt Park Avenue Synagogue, Schwartz did not begin that shul’s tradition of international leadership in the creative interpretation of musical prayer. “He said he would only take it if I could come with him. “I was in a choir in Israel and the director received a job offer to come to New York City,” Schwartz says during a Zoom interview last month. That passion, and accompanying soaring voice, has taken him to the heights of the Jewish world, as senior cantor for the past dozen years at famed Park Avenue Synagogue in Manhattan. One grandfather was a cantor who inspired young Azi Schwartz’s love of liturgical music. He is the 40-year-old grandson of four Holocaust survivors from Hungary and Czechoslovakia who all emigrated to Israel where they met after the War.
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