Milton Steinberg, 96, lover of cantorial music Milton Steinberg died on Jan. 14 from complications of COVID-19 at the age of 96. (Courtesy photo)
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(JTA) On the most solemn day of the Jewish calendar, the voice of Milton Steinberg rose to the heavens.
For more than a decade Steinberg, a Holocaust survivor with a resonant voice and a lifelong passion for cantorial music, joined Cantor Shimon Craimer of the Riverdale Jewish Center during the recitation of the Avodah prayer, a centerpiece of the Yom Kippur liturgy. With his shock of silver-gray hair, Steinberg was considered an elder statesman of the Orthodox synagogue he helped found and his stature contrasted with the much younger cantor.
(JTA) On the most solemn day of the Jewish calendar, the voice of Milton Steinberg rose to the heavens.
For more than a decade Steinberg, a Holocaust survivor with a resonant voice and a lifelong passion for cantorial music, joined Cantor Shimon Craimer of the Riverdale Jewish Center during the recitation of the Avodah prayer, a centerpiece of the Yom Kippur liturgy. With his shock of silver-gray hair, Steinberg was considered an elder statesman of the Orthodox synagogue he helped found and his stature contrasted with the much younger cantor.
“I will never forget the first time,” Craimer told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency from Israel, where he now lives. “It was like I was the protege and he was the master. … You could feel his entire life coming out. It was magical.”
Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17.1 (2003) 62-88
The Holocaust and American Public Memory, 1945-1960
San Diego State University
Abstract: Until the 1960s, many scholars assert, most Americans
awareness of the Holocaust was based upon vague, trivial, or inaccurate
representations. Yet the extermination of the Jews was remembered in
significant ways, this article posits, through World War II accounts,
the Nuremberg trials, philosophical works, comparisons with Soviet
totalitarianism, Christian and Jewish theological reflections, pioneering
scholarly publications, and mass-media portrayals. These early postwar
attempts to comprehend the Jewish tragedy within prevailing cultural
paradigms provided the foundation for subsequent understandings of
that event.
Between the end of the war and the 1960s, as anyone who has lived