Legendary Sephardic cantor dies
Dutch-born Abraham Cardozo served Manhattan synagogue for 50 yearsAssociated Press
Abraham Lopes Cardozo, a cantor recognized for his efforts to preserve the traditional music of Spanish and Portuguese Jews, died Tuesday at age 91, a relative said.
Cardozo died at a Manhattan hospital, son-in-law Sid Tenenbaum said. From 1946 until 1984, Cardozo worked as a cantor, or leader of music
during religious services, for Manhattan's Congregation Shearith Israel, the first Jewish congregation established in the United States.
The descendent of Portuguese Jews was born in Amsterdam in 1914. He started working as a teacher and cantor at a Portuguese congregation in a former Dutch colony now known as Suriname in 1939, allowing him to escape the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam during World War II.
He first visited New York in 1944 and began working as a cantor at the Shearith Israel synagogue two years later.
When he went to the Dutch Antilles, Cardozo took with him notebooks containing the liturgy, or collection of music used in Jewish ceremonies and observances. For years he kept the notebooks, which are now housed in the archives of Amsterdam's Portuguese synagogue.
Cardozo was well known in the Netherlands, where he was named a Knight of the Order of Oranje Nassau, a title equivalent to a British knighthood, in 2000 for his work preserving Dutch Jewish culture. A tribute to him aired on Dutch television last year.
In 2004, he traveled to Israel to record a CD, "The Western Sephardi Liturgical Tradition as Sung by Abraham Lopes Cardozo," released by the Jewish Music Research Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
A funeral was scheduled for Wednesday at Shearith Israel, which was founded in 1654. The congregation is now housed on Manhattan's Upper West Side in the fifth synagogue building it has occupied.
posted by jone @ 14:30
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