Temple Beth Israel to honor ‘spiritual grandparent’ Morris Hollender through song

Temple Beth Israel will pay musical tribute to the life of Holocaust survivor and treasured community member Morris Hollender in honor of what would have been his 100th birthday. 

On Sunday, April 27, the temple will host “A Bountiful Musical Source — The Morris Hollender 100th Birthday Concert,” planned as a unique tribute to the synagogue’s late cantor, Torah reader and “spiritual grandparent.”

“Mr. Hollender,” as he is still affectionately called by community members, joined the Harvard Street synagogue in the late 1960s after coming to America with his wife, Edith. He died in 2014. 

According to a website documenting his life, Hollender spent his early life in a farming village near Beregszasz, in what was then Czechoslovakia and is now part of western Ukraine. Hollender was raised in a musical family, and his relatives were responsible for leading prayers in their community. In 1944 the Hollender family was deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where his parents were killed. Hollender managed to survive.

After the war, Hollender met Edith Grossman in the Tatra Mountains, where he was recovering from tuberculosis and the injuries he sustained during the war. Hollender and Grossman married in 1950 and lived in Czechoslovakia until they were allowed to leave the region in 1967. The couple moved to Massachusetts and joined the Temple Beth Israel community. Hollender worked as a calibration technician for Panametrics in Waltham. 

Before his passing, Hollender taught Hankus Netsky the music of his youth, which Netsky and the Temple Beth Israel community now keep alive. “The program will include little-known melodies that Hollender learned as a child in the Munkacs region of Eastern Czechoslovakia (now Ukraine) and shared generously with [Temple Beth Israel] members and others during his years in the U.S.,” Netsky wrote.

Netsky, founder and director of the Klezmer Conservatory Band and co-chair of the New England Conservatory’s contemporary musical arts department, will direct Sunday’s performance of Hollender’s repertoire. 

Rabbi Jessica Kate Meyer, Itay Dayan and Eden MacAdam-Somer will accompany Netsky as the group performs traditional songs and niggunim (wordless melodies) from Hollender’s repertoire. Meyer is the director of the Musicant Cohen Center for Performing Arts at Newton’s Hebrew College, and MacAdam-Somer is co-chair of New England Conservatory’s contemporary musical arts department. Dayan is considered a promising voice in traditional Eastern European Jewish music, or klezmer, as well as global musical traditions.

Synagogue members spoke of Hollender’s contributions to the synagogue, its community and musical preservation. 

Edie Rosenberg, a member of the synagogue since 1996 and its membership director for two years, described Hollender as “the sweetest man” and “the soul of the synagogue.” She still remembers Hollender’s cantoral performances at services and Hanukkah concerts and said she’s excited for new people to hear Hollender’s melodies.

“This is music that would have disappeared if not for Mr. Hollender,” she said. 

Longtime synagogue member Mark Frydenberg noted Hollender’s humility, adding that because the Hollenders didn’t have children of their own, the synagogue community members adopted them as their own grandparents.