TORONTO — Cantor Benjamin Z. Maissner – known familiarly as Beny – will be honoured at a gala evening May 11 at the Royal Conservatory TELUS Centre for Performance and Learning’s Koerner Hall.
Cantor Benjamin Z. Maissner
Along with Maissner’s choirs, and cantors he has mentored, the 11 other performers at the event – most of whom have a personal connection with him – will include Michael Burgess, Joshua Nelson, Amy Sky, Theresa Tova and Daniel Domb.
Maissner, 65, has been cantor and musical director of Holy Blossom Temple for 30 years. A native of Israel, he was a child cantor who grew up in a family he describes as modern Orthodox.
His uncle, Israel Alter, the former chief cantor of Hanover and later a faculty member at Hebrew Union College (HUC) in New York, was Maissner’s role model, he told The CJN in his spacious second-floor office at the temple.
When Maissner decided he wanted to study chazzanut, HUC was thus “the more natural place to go,” he said.
Maissner – a classically trained lyric tenor – got his start at an egalitarian synagogue in Philadelphia, but says he found his home at Holy Blossom after he became cantor there in July 1979. The synagogue, he added is “much more traditional” than a typical Reform congregation.
With his Orthodox background and two daughters who are Orthodox (he also has a son), Maissner says he lives in two worlds. “I live a traditional life,” he said, adding that he studies once a week at an Orthodox yeshiva.
“I’m very proud of being [at Holy Blossom], but I’m very comfortable in the Orthodox [milieu].”
At Holy Blossom, Maissner said that – with the support of the congregation’s rabbis, who “saw the virtue of maintaining the high level of music and striving to create participating congregations” – he has been able to “galvanize the congregation into a very unique way of worship,” and teach them to daven and participate.
He works with both a professional and a volunteer choir at the synagogue, where “music is very important.” As well, he noted, “worship in the sense of community participation is very important to me.
“People do not know what Reform can be, and what Reform is.”
Outside of the synagogue, his musical tastes run from “Renaissance all the way to acid rock,” and he leads the Lachan Toronto Jewish Chamber Choir, named for his uncle’s 1950s-era musical organization. The choir has sung in North America, Shanghai and Nuremberg, Germany.
“It’s my own dream of promoting high-class Jewish music, not necessarily liturgical,” he said. The group’s music dates as far back as the 12th century.
Maissner’s office – where he has trained at least half a dozen of the city’s cantors and others occupying major pulpits elsewhere – is lined with books, CDs, artwork and documents acquired over the course of his career, among them two honorary doctorates of music, from the Jewish Theological Seminary and Hebrew Union College, his master’s of music degree from Temple University, and a 2004 Choir Olympics poster from Bremen.
In addition to the gala, Holy Blossom will establish a music archive and library in Maissner’s name, which will include recordings of ancient Sephardi and Ashkenazi music, compositions and scores by Maissner, by the temple’s former musical director and composer Ben Steinberg and by other Jewish musicians.
