Gershon Efros

Gerszon Efros was born on 15 January 1890 in Serock—a town where, on the threshold of the new century, life moved with surprising quietness. The events of the outside world, and of the Jewish world at large—wars, revolutions, strikes, unrest, Zionist and socialist awakenings, and the like—reached the town only as a faint resonance. From time to time a Zionist speaker would come to town, and the townspeople would listen to his address with impatience. “From mouth to mouth they spoke of a familiar person who distributed forbidden invitations to the surrounding farmers, and of how the gendarmes (police) would search for him in every nook and cranny.”[1]

The rabbi of Serock, Josef Lewinsztajn, was held in extraordinary reverence and is remembered as one of the most outstanding representatives of his generation in the history of Polish Jewry. Children aged five or six began their studies with Abraham Lejb, “a short man with a radiant face,”[2] who ran his own school on Kościuszki Street. Once they had learned the alphabet, the prayers, and the basics of the Torah, they moved elsewhere to continue their education.

When Gerszon was ten years old, his father died. He was buried in the cemetery three kilometers outside the town, on the road to Pułtusk, beyond a large sawmill and in the glow of the clear Narew River. Serock was then a rather poor small town from which many people were leaving. The town was gradually emptying. The young boy had to make his first life choice and set out on the road. From Serock, Gerszon carried with him his earliest memories of music. Lying in bed, he would often hear folk songs that his mother and her companions sang late into the night while working in the tailor’s workshop. He also remembered the sound of a flute played by one of the farmers in the marketplace, near the house where they lived.

Moshe Fromberg, Gerszon’s grandfather, was a cantor and the director of the synagogue choir in Widzew. It was there that young Efros discovered his talent, learned the basics of singing, and absorbed the musical tradition of the synagogue. Fromberg’s choir was known among many communities in central Poland and often lent splendor to celebrations in various small towns. The diversity of experiences awakened in its members a desire to deepen their musical and Judaic knowledge. Several of them went to Brest-Litovsk and later to Białystok for further study. Gerszon was among them, and he even became a soloist of the famous B’nai Jeshurun choir. In 1907 he returned to his home region and, for more than a year, served as director of the synagogue choir in Zgierz.

The extraordinary atmosphere of the area around Zgierz at that time is vividly captured in the recollections of one former Jewish resident: “One of the greatest joys of my young life was a trip to Łódź. There was not yet a train or an intercity electric tram, so the connection between Zgierz and Łódź was by horse-drawn wagons. […] I liked the journey, which led through open fields, flower beds, wonderful stretches of forest that attracted me with their dark mystery, and then again through expanses of fields and vineyards. The journey was long, and I grew very impatient to see the big city, which, in the eyes of a child from a small, quiet town, appeared as a mighty place filled with noise and the wonders of technology. I envied the drivers who could admire it every day.”[3]

The varied musical heritage Gerszon Efros encountered through cantors, conductors, and choristers stayed with him for the rest of his life. He copied by hand the works that particularly caught his attention. When he had to pack again, his luggage contained a particularly precious bundle: sheet music.

At the age of nineteen, Gerszon Efros faced the most difficult decision of his life. He was threatened with forced conscription into the Russian army, and on his uncle’s advice he decided to leave for Palestine. The route at the time led via Odessa—one of the most distinguished centers of cantorial and choral synagogue music. While waiting for the ship, Gerszon could not resist visiting as many synagogues as possible, absorbing the art practiced within them. After arriving, he abandoned his earlier plans of settling in a kibbutz and, by a fortunate coincidence, began studies in Jerusalem with the pioneer of Jewish musicology, the legendary Abraham Zvi Idelsohn. From Idelsohn he acquired a flair for searching out and analyzing old, traditional melodies and modes.

From that point on, he no longer made his life decisions entirely on his own. One evening he went to a Sabbath meal at the home of Chaim Hurwitz, where he met Hurwitz’s daughter, Rosa. In 1911 the family decided to emigrate to the United States. A year later, Gerszon and Rosa were married.

New York from exactly that period can be seen in one of the oldest surviving films made by the Swedish company Svenska Biografteatern, now available in HD. The streets of the city that never sleeps are filled with carriages and elegantly dressed people strolling along freshly laid sidewalks. Passers-by pause with curiosity to look into the camera, as the operators film not only the inhabitants but also the newest achievements of urban infrastructure and the city’s impressive panoramas. Gerszon Efros must have been convinced that he had finally found the place on earth he had been striving toward throughout his youth. He was not mistaken.

After Moshe Fromberg’s death, Efros inherited his manuscripts, which became the seed of his future collection of synagogue works. In 1927 he became cantor of Beth Mordecai Synagogue in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, where he served for the next thirty years. Proximity to New York gave him contact with many other cantors and access to dozens of music shops, antiquarian bookstores, and libraries in which he searched for synagogue musical literature. Over time, Gerszon Efros also became known as a composer. His life’s work is a six-volume Anthology—a monumental collection of his own works and those of other composers, arranged for cantor, choir, and organ, encompassing virtually all styles of synagogue music across nearly 350 years: Volume I—Rosh Hashanah (1929), Volume II—Yom Kippur (1940), Volume III—Festivals (1948), Volume IV—Shabbat (1953), Volume V—Y’mot Haḥol (weekdays, weddings, memorials, Purim, Hanukkah; 1957), and Volume VI—recitatives for Rosh Hashanah (1967). It is not clear whether further volumes were planned.

The Anthology is an enormous and fascinating compendium of synagogue music, containing works of which many survived to our times only thanks to Efros’s efforts. Many had never been published before, while other prints were never reissued. Its sources include Eastern European synagogues, German and other Central and Western European congregations, works by American and Israeli composers, as well as recitatives, responses, refrains, and congregational chants preserved in tradition. These materials are interwoven with Efros’s own compositions, revealing an extraordinary cultural diversity in the American context—drawing on many traditions while also expressing a modern approach to the questions he addressed.

Within this rich and multifaceted musical material we also find the names of composers and cantors active in the lands of historic Poland. Alongside the aforementioned Moshe Fromberg, these include: Jakub Weiss (1816–1981)—a cantor of many Warsaw synagogues, whose works, after years of oblivion, were recorded and released in 2023 for the first time in the history of recorded sound; Nissan Spivak (1824–1906)—a cantor in Berdychiv; Leo Low (1878–1960)—director of choirs at the Great Synagogue in Vilnius, the Great Synagogue in Bucharest, and finally the Great Synagogue on Tłomackie Street in Warsaw; Adolph Katchko (1888–1958)—cantor of the Nożyk Synagogue in Warsaw, born in Warta and educated in Kalisz; and Dawid Ajzensztadt (1889–1942)—the legendary and last director of the choir of the Great Synagogue on Tłomackie Street. Much of their music would not have survived to our times had it not found a place in Gerszon Efros’s Anthology.

Efros must have had a particularly personal relationship to these works, since they were connected to his childhood, his first lessons, and his deepest memories. Proof that they remained vivid in his mind is provided by the only organ-solo piece he included in the Anthology: the pastoral Pastorale Hebraïque, found in Volume IV, transports us directly to the Serock marketplace, where the sound of a shepherd’s flute once carried through the air, while at the same time drawing on Jewish liturgical modes that Efros must already have been learning at that time.

Thanks to his devotion, versatility, and the combination of musical talent with scholarly insight, Gerszon Efros became one of the most respected masters of synagogue music in the twentieth century. He was repeatedly invited to give lectures and classes, above all at Hebrew Union College in New York. He served on the boards of the Academy for Adult Jewish Education of the United Synagogue and the National Jewish Music Council, and received awards from a variety of organizations. He also worked for societies such as The Jewish Music Forum, The Jewish Liturgical Music Society of America, and The American Society for Jewish Music. This shows how favorable social circumstances enabled him not only to achieve recognition, but also to popularize the work he had made his life’s mission. The highest acknowledgement was a letter addressed to Gerszon Efros by the President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, on the occasion of the composer’s 70th birthday: “Through years of painstaking and admirable perseverance, your musical genius has enriched the religious treasury of your fellow believers—and indeed of all humanity.”

Gerszon Efros died on 28 June 1978, working, composing, and teaching until the end. Over eighty-eight years of life, he helped secure not only his own musical legacy, but also that of many cantors and composers. Today, alongside his remarkable musical achievements, his story can also inspire us—as a tale of consciously pursuing one’s life purpose, of extraordinary consistency and perseverance, of courageous life decisions, of valuing the diversity of the world, and of great ideals to which it is worth dedicating one’s life.

[1] Sefer Serotsk, ed. M. Gelbart, Tel Aviv 1971.
[2] Sefer Zgierz: Mazkeret netsal le-kehila yehudit be-Polin, ed. D. Sztokfisz, Sh. Kanc, Z. Fisher, Tel Aviv, 1975–86.
[3] “A Guide To The Unpublished Musical Works Of Gershon Ephros,” Musica Judaica 11, no. 1 (1989).