Kabbalat Shabbat Services in the Pestalozzi Street Synagogue

 Like last Friday, tonight I attended the beautiful Kabbalat Shabbat services at the Pestalozzi Street Synagogue. What makes this synagogue special is the fact that it preserves a musical tradition that is unique to (liberal) German Judaism. Most of the melodies played on the organ (!) and sung by the choir (!) and the cantor (chazzan) Isidoro Abramowicz were composed by the composer Louis Lewandowski. At home and in my synagogue in Israel, as in many, many homes and temples all over the world, every Friday the Kiddush that we sing uses Lewandowski's melody. In front of the Synagogue, many Stolpersteine can be found. 



 A portrait of Lewandowski at the Jewish Museum



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A little bit about myself

Image
My name is Yonathan Bar-On (Bert de Bruin). Born and raised in the Netherlands, I have lived in Israel since 1992. I am a historian and a columnist for the Dutch daily Friesch Dagblad, and I have been teaching English at the high school of the Leo Baeck Education Center in Haifa, Israel for the last 15 years. In my classes, besides the English high school curriculum, I usually have time to do extracurricular projects. I have developed class projects (often using material provided by Centropa ) on topics like human rights, refugees, Holocaust, migration, and resistance in Nazi-Germany. You can get an impression of those and other projects by clicking here . I've participated in Centropa seminars in Berlin, Hamburg, Vienna, Sarajevo, and Prague. With two different Ukrainian schools, in 2024 and 2025 I did a project titled 'Comfort Food in Times of War', in which our students shared experiences from the wars in their country and made videos about dishes that helped them cope ...
Read more

The Man in the Clouds - A trilingual book for interreligious and intercultural dialogue and education

Image
This project will be the main focus during my stay in Berlin. It started in 2016 as an idea for a workshop in Stuttgart for Palestinian and Israeli teachers: to have Israeli, Palestinian and German students translate a Dutch children's book into Arabic, Hebrew and German, get a trilingual, fully illustrated edition of the book published, and use that book in Israeli, Palestinian and German elementary schools. The book was written by Koos Meinderts and Annette Fienieg, whose permission to use the text and illustrations I asked and received before I started working on the project. The book is  The Man in the Clouds (De man in de wolken) , and it deals with the importance of giving, sharing, accepting the other, and the dangers of greed and materialism. Its main themes are universal, which together with the beautiful illustrations makes the book a great tool for intercultural and interreligious dialogue and education. I teach English at the Leo Baeck Education Center in Haifa, and fou...
Read more

One project finished - A Practical Guide to Memorials of Persecution and Resistance in and around Berlin

Image
 The first (though secondary) of the two projects that I worked on during my time in Berlin has been finished successfully. It is a practical guide for anybody who is in Berlin and wants to visit one or more of the 69 memorials and museums that appear in the guide. It includes a useful guide with a basic description, links to a website (for most sites) and the location in Google maps, plus information about opening hours etc. where relevant. The guide is called 'To Warn and Remember' and you can find it here . My cooperative project with House of One is in an advanced stage. I'm waiting for feedback and input from my Berlin colleagues, as soon as I have that (before the end of the month, I assume) I will finish, publish, and share the learning units based on 'The Man in the Clouds' .
Read more