By Charlotte Halle Haaretz May 29, 2003

“You could sit in synagogue, close your eyes and know - just from the tune - what day of the year it was,” says Pinchas Melchior, recalling his youth in Copenhagen.

The rich musical heritage of Danish Jewry is reflected in the vast array of melodies used in the Great Synagogue of Copenhagen, says Melchior, who now lives in Ra’anana. A testimony to this heritage, he suggests, is the inexhaustible number of tunes for Psalm 126, “Shir Hama’alot,” which is traditionally sung prior to Grace After Meals on Shabbat and holidays.

Together with fellow former Dane, Ralph Levitan, and his late nephew, Ino Schwarz, Melchior has now ensured many of the tunes Danish Jews use for Shir Hama’alot will not be lost even though the Jewish community back in Copenhagen is shrinking: The trio have recorded a CD containing 32 different versions of the psalm.

“It was mainly our children nagging us,” says Melchior on the impetus behind recording the disc. “They liked the tradition of not singing the same tune every Shabbat and asking `What Shir Hama’alot shall we sing today?’”

The disc, which has just been released, contains a full calendar of variations, including two different tunes for the festival of Passover and two for Shavuot, both based on musical motifs from the melodies used to sing the holiday prayers.

For Hanukkah, there is a tune which combines the festival’s melody for the Kadish prayer and the tune of the most popular Hanukkah song “Maoz Tzur.” There is a special tune for two of the three weeks of mourning leading up to Tisha B’Av, plus a separate melody for the Shabbat immediately preceding Tisha B’Av and a medly of tunes for Simhat Torah, when the completion of the annual reading of the Torah is celebrated.

“When you approach a holiday, applying the special tune for that holiday on the Shabbatot leading up to it creates an expectation and a revival of the amosphere of that holiday,” says Melchior.

The first 18 tracks on the disc, however, are not designated for any particular time of the year. While the sources of many of these tunes were unknown to the team that put together the disc, Melchior says they were reluctant to label them as unknown because “someone, somewhere may well know the source”; hence track titles which indicate music style and/or liturgical origin, such as “European in Major,” “Waltz style in Major,” and “The American,” which Melchior reports was “brought over” to Denmark on a record in the late 1940s.

However, he is confident to say that most tunes on the disc are influenced by 19th-century German Jewish liturgical composers, such as Salomon Sulzer.

Though he says the idea of the project had been mooted for more than a decade, Melchior sadly reports that it was only when his nephew Schwarz was diagnosed with cancer two years ago that the privately funded venture really took shape.

In order to compile the tunes, Melchior says the trio sat down together to brainstorm all the melodies for the psalm they could remember. They did not approach others, he says, as they were already overloaded with material.

“I’m sure some tunes have undergone various transitions and variations,” says Melchior. “There were tunes that were sung differently in my home and in Ralph’s. In those cases, we agreed on the tune used on the most regular basis.”

Levitan, a former cantor at Copenhagen synagogue who now owns his own recording studio in Tel Aviv, would make a note of each tune and prepare the musical accompaniment. The recording process - on most tracks all three men sing together - was hastened due to Schwarz’s illness, says Melchior. Schwarz passed away in October last year, at the age of 51, having contributed to most of the tracks and declared his satisfaction with the results, which Levitan had musically arranged.

Safely evacuated

While of course the tradition of interchanging tunes exists outside of the Danish Jewish community, Melchior believes a particular combination of factors allowed the custom to especially thrive in Copenhagen.

He says the tolerance displayed towards Jews in Danish society helped a rich culture to flourish. (Unlike German Jewry, which was mostly wiped out during the Holocaust, the large majority of Danish Jewry was rescued and safely evacuated to Sweden, including 5-year-old Melchior and his family.)

According his wife, Batya Melchior, who was also born in Denmark and is involved in distributing the 1,000 discs produced, the large physical space inside Copenhagen’s 170-year-old synagogue also contributed.

“We needed cantors with big voices,” she says. “It was natural to look for music to beautify the synagogue. Small shuls don’t have professional cantors, who are prepared to develop those special traditions.”

Melchior believes the character of the community also played a role: “People got very particular about this [tradition],” he says. “Heaven forbid, the chazan would start the wrong tune. He would not only be corrected, but probably reprimanded.”

“And it has something to do with being a Yekke [of German origin]” chips in his wife with a smile.

Melchior, who has lived in Israel since 1960, works as a professional mediator and manages Isrentco, the company which deals with rental apartments for new immigrants on behalf of Telfed (the South African Zionist Federation). A former deputy head of Amit Kfar Batya High School in Ra’anana, Melchior is part of Danish Jewry’s well-known family dynasty, with roots in the country traceable back to 1760, when they arrived from Northern Germany.

His father, Marcus Melchior, was chief rabbi of Copenhagen, as was his brother Rabbi Bent Melchior, whose son Rabbi Michael Melchior was a minister in the Barak government and remains in the Knesset. Another elder brother made aliyah to pre-state Palestine and worked as an advisor to Abba Eban; another was twice a cabinet minister in Denmark and has been an MP there for over 25 years.

“My father was very proud that his six children were split evenly between Israel and Denmark, with three continuing the Jewish community of Denmark and three helping build the Jewish state,” says Melchior. The balance was not maintained for the next generation; only four of his father’s 17 grandchildren live outside of Israel.

“Everyone who has grown up in a traditional Danish Jewish family will have memories of these tunes, even if they don’t have the proficiency to reproduce them,” says Melchior. “That’s the main purpose of this disc. We want it to be a vehicle for continuing the tradition.”

For more information about the disc, call (09) 774-6106 or 054-200583.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 30th, 2003 and is filed under news.