Israel Goldfarb

Goldfarb was born in Galicia — sources use the spellings Lieniava and Sieniawa — with different records giving his birth date as either January 1, 1881, or December 15, 1879/1881.[4][1] He was the son of David Goldfarb.[4] Israel was the older brother of Samuel E. Goldfarb, whom he later joined in publishing and editing Jewish music collections.[5][6] He grew up in a family of eleven children that emigrated from Galicia and settled on New York City's Lower East Side; Israel arrived in the city in 1893.[1][5]

In New York, Goldfarb pursued both religious and musical training. He attended high school in New York City, studied at the Institute of Musical Art — a predecessor of the Juilliard School — and earned a B.S. from Columbia University.[1][2] He received a diploma from and was ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.[4][2] He also taught Samuel to read and play music.[5]

Goldfarb served as cantor at Congregation B'nai Jeshurun in Tompkinsville, Staten Island, and a contemporary American Jewish Year Book recorded his election as minister of Congregation Beth Israel in Brooklyn in 1905.[7] A later reference work dates his service as rabbi and cantor of Kane Street Synagogue — Congregation Beth Israel Anshei Emes — from 1904 to 1956 and says he remained rabbi emeritus until his death.[2] When he arrived, the congregation had recently completed a merger and was moving into a converted church building on Kane Street; his music helped unite the divergent parts of the congregation through those transitions.[2] The synagogue became known as the mother congregation of Brooklyn, with Union Temple, East Midwood Jewish Center, and Flatbush Jewish Center among the congregations that followed from its formation.[2]

At the Jewish Theological Seminary, Goldfarb served as an instructor in hazanuth — the art of cantorial chant — and was among the founders of the institution's Cantor's Institute, where he taught for decades.[6][2] He also held leadership roles in the broader Jewish religious community, serving as a founder of the Cantors Association of America and as president of the New York Board of Jewish Ministers.[1]

Goldfarb tested new compositions at his synagogue and at his own Sabbath table before they spread into the wider Jewish world.[5] He formed a youth choir of boys and girls at his synagogue — an unusual arrangement for its time — that served social as well as spiritual purposes.[5] His High Holiday melodies and other compositions were ultimately chanted so widely that they came to be regarded as traditional.[5]

Goldfarb's most enduring composition is the melody for "Shalom Aleichem," the Shabbat table-song welcoming the ministering angels.[3] In a 1963 letter, he recalled composing the melody on a Friday in 1918 on the campus of Columbia University.[3] The tune has also been dated precisely to May 10, 1918.[8] The poem itself is distinct from the melody: it originated among kabbalists in northern Israel in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, whereas Goldfarb's tune is an early-twentieth-century composition.[3]

The melody became familiar across Jewish communities and came to be treated by many listeners as traditional.[2][9] It later inspired new settings by Debbie Friedman, Rabbi Shmuel Brazil, and Rabbi Joy Levitt.[8]

Another well-known composition is his "Magen Avot" melody. It appears in a 150-page manuscript compilation of High Holiday services assembled by cantor Pinchas Spiro, containing recitatives and compositions for cantor and choir and cataloged with a creation date in the 1960s.[10] Together, Goldfarb's "Shalom Aleichem" and "Magen Avot" melodies are sung in nearly every Ashkenazi synagogue in North America.[2]

In 1918, Israel and Samuel Goldfarb jointly published Friday Evening Melodies, issued by the Bureau of Jewish Education in New York. The collection presented Hebrew songs arranged for children's voices in two parts with piano accompaniment, with texts in Hebrew and romanized Hebrew.[11] The brothers later co-edited The Jewish Songster, a collection prepared for Jewish religious schools. The scanned volume contains a seventh revised edition of Part I dated 1929 and Part II dated 1928.[6] It includes "Sholom Alechem," and a preface to its fifth revised edition reports that 30,000 copies had reached religious schools and homes throughout the country.[6]

Beyond his own compositions and congregational work, Goldfarb invested significantly in the institutional future of Jewish liturgical music. In the 1920s, he and Cantor Jacob Schwartz pioneered efforts to establish a formal cantorial training school in America — an ambition that placed them at the forefront of efforts to professionalize the field.[12] Goldfarb proposed a four-year curriculum combining Hebrew, liberal arts, music, and hazzanut, designed to address the need for trained cantors and to standardize Eastern European cantorial practice for the American context.[12] JTS chancellor Cyrus Adler did not act on the plan, and the effort stalled.[12]

Goldfarb later chaired a committee pursuing the same goal through the Society for the Advancement of Jewish Liturgical Music, revisiting the framework of his 1925 JTS proposal while adapting it to contemporary needs.[12] He was also named among the proposed faculty for the Hebrew Union College School of Sacred Music, where he was to teach traditional melodies. When Eric Werner's competing plan advanced, Goldfarb's curriculum work was largely set aside, though he remained among those considered for the faculty.[12]

Goldfarb earned the informal title "father of congregational singing" for his decades of work bringing participatory musical worship to Brooklyn's Jewish community.[2] He died on February 13, 1967, in Oceanside, New York.[1] At his funeral, his son-in-law Rabbi Irving Lehman described "the song of his life" as his most beautiful melody.[2]

His music continued to be performed and recorded after his death. Artists including Celtic guitarist Tony McManus and Jewish violinist Itzhak Perlman performed works from his catalog.[2] His grandson Henry Michelman was expected to be named his successor at Kane Street Synagogue.[2] The "Shalom Aleichem" melody remains his most far-reaching contribution: familiar to most Israeli Jews, it illustrates how a modern composed tune can enter Jewish liturgical life as though it were inherited tradition.[2][9]

Several details of Goldfarb's biography are recorded inconsistently across sources. The American Jewish Year Book gives his birth date as January 1, 1881, at Lieniava, Galicia, while the Concise Dictionary of American Jewish Biography records December 15, with the year listed as "1879/1881," and gives his birthplace as Sieniawa, Galicia.[4][1] A later reference work gives his lifespan as 1879–1967.[2] These records establish disagreement over his exact birth date, year, and the spelling of his birthplace but do not explain the discrepancies. Sources are consistent on his death in 1967 and on the principal facts of his career.[1][2]