By Jay P. Goldman, TI Bulletin editor
“If you missed tonight’s concert, then you really blew it! People will be talking about it for a long time.”
That was Co-President Jonathan Solomon’s forceful reaction in the immediate aftermath of this year’s Cantor’s Concert on March 30 at Tikvat Israel.
The 90-minute program in the social hall was a musical and literary delight, the weaving of beautiful music and touching (and all true) short personal stories delivered by some genuinely talented stage communicators.
Titled “Tales of the Unleavened,” the show “proved once again,” as Solomon put it, that Cantor Rochelle Helzner “boldly goes where no cantor has gone before.” The event serves as the biggest fundraising event on the synagogue’s 12-month calendar.
The program opened with a singing seder plate before launching into the first of six tales with Jewish themes shared by a series of crafty story tellers, including TI’s own Shelly Goldin. She led off the array by delivering delightful details of the Passover preparations in her family home in New York City during her youth. This meant coping with the smell of beets fermenting in the family’s den in the leadup to the holiday for her mother’s borscht and the serving of soup first to all the men around the table.
She was followed by attorney Daren Firestone, who detailed his time at a mikvah in a Hasidic community in Israel, where he was paired in the frigid pool with a fellow named Big Mo. Amy Saidman, artistic director at Speakeasy DC, the organization that manages the story tellers, mixed a tale of an AISH speed dating event at a U Street restaurant with her time as a 19-year-old on an Orthodox kibbutz in Israel.
Adam Ruben, a program host on cable’s Science Channel, shared his personal adventure as a Reform Jew participating on the Princeton evangelical student group’s ski trip. Neda Ulaby, a cultural news reporter for National Public Radio, detailed how she often is mistaken by others as being Jewish when she always assumed her father to be Syrian and her mother Irish – only to learn in graduate school that her biological father was a Jewish man with whom her mother had a brief affair.
The final tale teller, John Donvan, an ABC News correspondent, described his current home life as a non-Jew married to a Jew and raising his children as Jews. “I’m a minority in my own household,” he quipped.
Musical interludes between the stories featured the cantor and her sister Robyn, a professional folk singer, and her father Manny Helzner, delivering an expressive Yiddish folk number. Marcia Bronstein and Dan Black accompanied on piano and drum, respectively.
Following the show, patrons were treated in The Gudelsky Lobby to tables of delectable finger desserts (all kosher for Passover) prepared by congregants Larry Gorban and Bonnie Cowan.
The concert coordinator was Mary Wagner. More than 300 people attended the show.
