A vibrant musical legacy on display at Temple Beth Israel’s Morris Hollender birthday concert

On April 27, Temple Beth Israel in Waltham hosted the Morris Hollender 100th Birthday Anniversary concert, honoring the legacy of one of their most beloved community members. 

Hankus Netsky, founder and director of the Klezmer Conservatory Band and co-chair of the New England Conservatory’s contemporary musical arts department, led the joyful performance at last week’s concert. Accompanied by vocalist Rabbi Jessica Kate Meyer, violinist and vocalist Eden MacAdam-Somer and clarinetist Itay Dayan, Netsky led the effort to widen the reach of Hollender’s music. 

Additional performances included the New England Conservatory Jewish Music Ensemble, soloed by Lucy Geller who performed what had traditionally been Hollender’s solo. 

Chaia, a student of Netsky’s, performed an electronic version of Hollender’s “Purim Spiel” in the style of the Kleztronica genre. 

“I’m very excited to be here because, though it’s been some years since Morris Hollender passed, the music of his life is still so alive and present. And it’s wonderful to see Hankus bringing that to the broader Jewish world,” Chaia said.

After the Holocaust, finding a new home in Waltham

Hollender was born in a village near Beregszasz, in what was then Czechoslovakia and is now part of western Ukraine. As a child of a musical family, responsible for leading prayer services in their farming village, Hollender committed himself to learning the music of his people. Hollender was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. After surviving unspeakable tragedy, he married his wife, Edith Grossman, and the couple moved to the Boston area in the late 1960s. Hollender had served as the Waltham synagogue’s cantor, Torah reader and “spiritual grandparent.” He died in 2014.

Programs distributed ahead of the April 27 performance featured a photo of Hollender holding a Torah and a scan of a letter he wrote for the synagogue newsletter in 1999. He wrote, “After arriving in the United States 32 years ago, I felt like an old uprooted tree which has been transplanted into a different soil and climate. Thanks for helping me to grow and find happiness in my new adopted country.” 

The Temple Beth Israel community seems to have grown from his spiritual nurturing as well. During the concert, members of the audience sang along to familiar songs, nodded their heads, swayed, clapped their hands or bowed their heads with closed eyes in meditation.

During intermission, audience members greeted each other gleefully. Dayan said, “I learned these songs with Hankus and everyone knows them. People sing along to everything. It’s really traditional in a lively kind of way. Traditional is alive.” 

Temple Beth Israel members shared their memories of Hollender and the names he fondly called them. One community member, who works as a lawyer, said that Hollender affectionately called him “Mr. Justice.” One ad in the program said Hollender was a “creator of unique names of affection for each of us.”  

Charlotte Diamond, a resident of Brookhaven Senior Living, heard about the event from a fellow resident in the retirement community. She said, “Jewish music is so filled with pathos and suffering and joy that you rarely hear such wonderful Yiddish music. So it’s a great opportunity.” 

Scott Tepper, a member of the synagogue, said that he had met Hollender a few times before his passing. “His own story of survival was just so amazing to hear, and the wealth of music that he brought to this congregation was just incredible,” he said. 

At the end of the concert, chains of dancers holding hands or linking arms “grapevined” and side-stepped around the room to the tune of the “Hollender Family Nign.” “Will you dance if I dance?” one woman asked another, offering her arm. 

Netsky said that the success of the concert is a testimony to the endurance of the synagogue’s community and its wonderful congregants who have kept the synagogue alive since its founding in 1914. Netsky said, “Morris Hollender’s legacy belongs to this synagogue and belongs to Waltham.”