Khazonisdiker Hesped: A Handful of Memories for Cantor Benzion Miller (1947-2025)
I first met Cantor Benzion Miller in 2009 in Krakow, at the closing outdoor concert on Szeroka Street at the Jewish Culture Festival, where Jewish music performers from around the world played to an audience of thousands each year. My band, The Sway Machinery, was among the featured acts. Benzion, a legend of cantorial music, had been a mainstay of the Festival for years. Beyond his status as a key exponent of khazones, an historic style of Eastern European Jewish spiritual music, Benzion was a living link to the Jewish history of Krakow and the Galicia region of Poland. Benzion’s father and grandfather before him, had served as cantors and choir singers in the Bobov Hasidic community in the nearby town of Oswieçim. The hometown of these great musicians has come to be infamous to the world, under its German name Auschwitz, for the silencing of Jewish life. Rather than a monument to the deaths of the Jews of Poland, Benzion’s performances in Krakow were filled with light, suffused with joy and emotional elevation; they were even humorous at times. Remarkably, his main audiences in Krakow were non-Jewish Poles, who looked to Benzion for a glimpse of continuity with their seemingly irreparably lost pre-War multicultural society.
Before the concert, in the backstage artists tent a different kind of performance was taking place. Benzion was leading a singing session of nigunim (paraliturgical devotional melodies typically intended for communal singing) along with some members of his family who were traveling and performing with him. Some of the other musicians who were performing, including myself, joined in. I remember the surge of joy I felt from his voice, and the educative effect of his musical knowledge that was guiding the eclectic assembled group through the tricky sequence of passages in the songs. This feeling of being guided by his voice was something I would be blessed to return to in later years.
I met Benzion again in Krakow at the festival a few years later. I was walking down the street of the Jewish Quarter at night and I ran into my friend Frank London. Frank invited me to follow him, into a building courtyard, down some stairs, into an institutional kitchen in the basement, where Benzion stood wearing a heavy apron over his trademark white shirt and black slacks. He was stirring an enormous pot of cholent for the Shabbos meal the next day. He gave me some to taste. It was delicious and hearty. We chatted about music for a few minutes and he asked me to sing something for him. I started to sing V’al Yedey Avodecha by Zawel Kwartin. Benzion cut me off almost immediately to correct a detail of phrasing, telling me to place the breath at a different point in the phrase to bring out the meaning of the words in a more thoughtful manner. Then he sang himself, demonstrating what he meant, and the real instruction began. As with many elder cantors, his explicit “teaching,” as such, was less impactful than the cultural pedagogy of his performance. Listening to Benzion sing, hearing his interpretations of classic repertoire and his improvisations was a powerful point of learning.
Years passed and I started working on my dissertation research on young cantors in the Brooklyn Hasidic community. I had heard from multiple cantors about Benzion’s monthly prayer leading at Beth El of Borough Park. Singing in the choir that supported Benzion served as a kind of training ground and social network for aspiring cantors. I met with Benzion for an interview in 2019, spending a memorable afternoon chatting with him about the past and future of khazones. He offered many wonderful stories about his life. One detail that stands out was a discussion about his musical tastes. “A cantor,” he told me, “needs to listen to everything.” What he meant by “everything” was quite specific. In addition to classic early 20th century records of cantors, Benzion loved opera, classical symphonic music, Greek music that he listened to on the radio (presumably on the Cosmos FM program that broadcasts in New York City), and other genres of Jewish music like Klezmer and Hasidic song. In this summary of his listening, Benzion outlined the poly-system of Ashkenazi liturgical music, with its affinities for European (Christian) art music, music of the post-Ottoman and Balkan worlds, and its close familial relations with the “folklore” of Yiddish vernacular and popular music genres. I noted how Benzion’s artistic life was an exemplary model for cantorial habits of mind and artistic practice.
In 2021, I moved back to New York City after completing my graduate studies in California. Shortly after my arrival in Brooklyn, I started singing in the choir at Beth El for Benzion’s monthly Shabbos mevarchim (Sabbath of the new month) prayer leading service. Benzion’s davening was a transformative experience that I have spent many words trying to evoke, with mixed success, including in posts for this Conversations blog series, as well as in my book. I will offer here a memory of walking home through the snow on the long way home from the service. Exhausted—the service was typically four hours long—and elevated, the streets raced before me. As a non-Hasidic Jew, I felt like an outsider in Borough Park, but at the same time I felt a different kind of belonging, at least at moments.
Being enveloped in the sound of Benzion’s voice and his magisterial evocation of the long history of Yiddish sacred music, I felt a rupture in time, a healing suture that bridged together different historical moments: the choir shuls of the great Jewish metropolises of Europe that have been lost forever; the immigrant prayer services in New York led by stars newly arrived across the Atlantic; and the sound of the gramophone cantors of the 1920s, but more specifically the pipe smoke-filled back room of my grandparents apartment in Queens and the hours we spent listening to tapes of reissues of the old masters, hushed and meditative in the waves of sound. The experience of singing in the choir supporting Benzion was a healing for me, offering a place where I felt the world made a kind of sense, where a momentary spherical harmony between sound and history prevailed, even if the entire undertaking was hanging on by a slender thread produced by the knowledge and labor of a fragile elder.
That thread has broken.
The last memory I will offer is from the funeral of Benzion last week, attended by hundreds in the Borough Park neighborhood he had served for decades. His wonderful sons, Shimmy and Ellie, were among several family members who gave moving eulogies. I was particularly struck by some of Ellie’s words, to the effect that his father adhered to a set of customs that almost no one else has preserved. It was a striking sentiment, offering testimony to the fragility of musical continuity, even in the context of a contemporary Orthodox Jewish milieu that prides itself on the sustaining of tradition.
Benzion’s imprint on the world of Jewish music was profound, attested to by the presence of luminaries such as Avraham Fried and Yitzchak Meir Helfgott at the funeral. His legacy was also represented by a cohort of younger cantors in attendance, including members of his own family. I rejoice in the memory of the life force he shared generously with the world. At the same time, Benzion’s passing throws into relief the ceaselessness of change and loss as perpetual aspects of culture. The century-long era of great cantors presiding at Beth El, a major musical center of international Jewish life, has slipped into the memories of old New York.
Further listening:
Benzion Miller released numerous records with the Milken Archive of Jewish Music. They can be accessed online here:
https://www.milkenarchive.org/artists/view/benzion-miller