Mr. Hollender's Opus

Listen to a nign (wordless melody), from Rabbi Shapiro, the son of the Bershter rebe (a prominent Hassidic leader) and a composer of many nigunim. Rabbi Shapiro was staying with the Hollenders when the Germans took over Beregszasz, and he travelled with them on the same train to Auschwitz, where he was killed by the Nazis. (MP3, 2.5 MB)

“To show you where I’m from I will draw you a map.” And with these words, Morris Hollender takes a piece of paper and marks the location of his birthplace on a farm south of Beregszasz, a Carpathian mountain town not too far from Muncacz in a region that is now part of western Ukraine. In 1925, the year of his birth, the area was known as Carpato-Ruthenia, the eastern-most province of Czechoslovakia.

As Mr. Hollender remembers it, Czechoslovakia in the early-to-mid 1930s was a paradise for Jews, thanks to the enlightened leadership of Thomas Masaryk. Raised in a climate of vicious Anti-Semitism, Masaryk grew into a great intellectual and writer determined to fight against all forms of bigotry – until Hitler put an end to his regime. During his tenure as president, he took great pleasure in riding through the streets of Muncacz alongside prominent rabbis and community leaders. “We felt like we had nothing to fear. We could dress traditionally. Everyone wore payes (side-curls) and tsitses (ritual undergarments) - we always felt protected.”

While Mr. Hollender takes plenty of pride in his Czech roots, he is quick to mention his family’s sojourn in pre-expulsion Spain, and in the Netherlands for many years after that. His Sephardic origins notwithstanding, he fluently converses not only in English and Slovak, but also in Hungarian, German, Yiddish, and Hebrew. But he is especially fluent in every aspect of the rich Jewish religious culture passed down in his family for many generations. His father, uncle, and brothers were all renowned for their singing and their knowledge of nigunim (melodies) from local and legendary rabonim (Hassidic rabbis) and khazonim (cantors). A survivor of Auschwitz and a former resident of postwar Czechoslovakia, Mr. Hollender emigrated to America in 1968 with his wife Edith, also a survivor, and keeps the culture he loves alive by serving as bal-korey (Torah reader) and bal-tfile (lay cantor) at Temple Beth Israel, a traditional egalitarian congregation in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Since this past summer, several of our interns have been working with me on a project to bring Mr. Hollender’s cultural legacy to life on a larger scale. Progress has continued through the fall and winter as the Book Center’s work-study students have helped create a rich catalogue of nusekh (Eastern European synagogue melodies), nigunim, folksongs, and stories that are now a basic component of our “Discovery Project” curriculum, a curriculum I’ve been using to great effect at the Book Center, Hampshire College, New England Conservatory, and in residencies and workshops throughout New England.

But there’s more: You can also click the link above and hear one of the dozens of nigunim preserved by this humble hero of Jewish cultural perseverance.