Honoring the founders of “Community of Harmony”

In 1991, two cantors — gratified and grateful that their efforts to “make a joyful noise unto the Lord” had found success at their two congregations as they formed choirs filled with talented, passionate singers — came to the logical conclusion that inviting those choristers to meld their voices would result in even more joyful noise.

That realization resulted in the founding of Kol Dodi, the Jewish Community Chorale.

Those two cantors, Joel Caplan and Erica “Riki” Lippitz, will be celebrated at a Kol Dodi concert on Thursday, June 5, called “A Legacy of Love: Honoring Our Founding Directors.” The choir is now under the direction of Cantor Anna West Ott and Matthew Onigman. (See box.)

It is fitting that Kol Dodi’s origin began in the stratosphere. Cantors Lippitz and Caplan found themselves sitting next to each other on a flight returning to New Jersey from Los Angeles. They’d both been at that year’s Conservative movement’s Cantors Assembly convention. Cantor Caplan was the chazan at Congregation Agudath Israel in Caldwell, as he has been since 1982 and still is today. Cantor Lippitz became the chazan at Oheb Shalom Congregation in South Orange in1987; in 2021 she retired and became the shul’s cantor emerita. Now she lives in Chicago, where she grew up.

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The cantors talked on that long flight; one of their subjects was their congregational choirs. Cantor Lippitz worked with about a dozen amateur singers at Oheb Shalom, and Cantor Caplan, with about 10 at Agudath Israel.

They were exciting by what they had seen and heard at the convention. There was a choir that had been assembled from local congregational singing groups; Cantor Lippitz said she was “flabbergasted by the beauty of the performance of this one large choir.”

Still inspired by that and after comparing notes, Cantor Caplan said they shared an epiphany — “Not unlike Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney crying out, ‘Hey, let’s put on a show!’ in one of their old movie musicals, we said, ‘Say, why don’t we combine our choirs? It’ll be far more rewarding and successful for 22 singers to make harmony together, rather than 10 or 12.’”

And, like Mickey and Judy, bubbling with enthusiasm, they immediately took the idea up an octave, adding, “And while we’re at it, let’s open it up to the whole community!”

That notion — forming a “non-audition” choir, open to all — was crucial to their vision. Cantor Lippitz said she immediately foresaw not only how such a group would work, but its potential benefits, anticipating that singers would be excited to come together with like-minded Jewish music lovers. “To sing in a choir is to say, ‘I can create something extraordinary,’” she said. “It’s to energize people who might feel they only have a small amount to give, but in joining their voices with others, they are part of the creation of something beautiful and inspiring, both to participants and listeners.”

And the name? Kol Dodi (“the voice of my beloved,” from “Song of Songs”) emerged naturally. Neither cantor remembers who thought of it first, but they both loved it from the start.

Cantors Lippitz and Caplan formed Kol Dodi under the aegis of the Jewish Education Association of what was then United Jewish Federation of MetroWest (a forerunner of what is now the Partnership for Jewish Learning and Life of the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest NJ).

Being given a “nest” at JEA “was a most generous offer that resulted in a wonderful model — a win-win for the community,” Ms. Lippitz said. “This exciting partnership embraced the choir members, the federation, the JEA, and the clergy. Everybody brought their gifts to create something new.” It also provided Kol Dodi with a place of its own — free rehearsal space at JCC MetroWest in West Orange, where it met weekly.

When word first went out inviting singers to register for Kol Dodi, it was offered as part of the 1991 fall semester of JEA’s Midrasha Institute of Jewish Studies. The initiative was described as a community chorale that would “practice and perform a varied repertoire of Israeli folk songs, Yiddish and chasidic melodies, and traditional and modem liturgical compositions” and would appear “regularly at community events and celebrations.”

The founders set high standards; in their initial announcement, Cantor Lippitz said the intention was “to follow in the glorious footsteps of the world-famous Zamir and Rinat Israel chorales,” and Cantor Caplan emphasized that because it was a Midrasha course, “we will be providing a teaching dimension to our explorations of Jewish music.”

(Kol Dodi is now under the sponsorship of the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater MetroWest NJ. It rehearses at Morristown Jewish Center-Beit Yisrael, which provides the space free of charge and where co-director Matthew Onigman’s wife, Shana, is the cantor.)

As Kol Dodi launched, “folks at federation also got excited to be part of a community-wide asset, leading to greater publicity and increasing numbers of people signing on,” Cantor Lippitz said.” Co-ownership was important; psychologically Kol Dodi belonged to everyone.”

Evidence of how that asset played out can be gleaned from a dive into the archives of the New Jersey Jewish News. Putting “Kol Dodi” into the search box yields hundreds of hits, announcements of upcoming performances, offering an expansive overview of the fruits of the partnership. Many federation and JCC events featured Kol Dodi on the program. The group gave concerts over the years at synagogues and senior communities, Hillels and schools, to Jewish and interfaith audiences.

Representing the federation community, Kol Dodi performed at all manner of commemorations, joyous and somber, at festivities, ecumenical and Jewish, to mark Israel’s milestones, and at festivals and celebrations of holidays, communal occasions, and life-cycle events.

Its first public performance, on October 13, 1991, at Agudath Israel, was a post-High Holiday choir festival that featured synagogue ensembles from throughout the region. The Kol Dodi kickoff featured “modern Jewish music sung by 40-50 voices.”

Kol Dodi was a pioneering venture, according to Cantor Caplan, “We were the very first Jewish open-to-all community choir in New Jersey. We were one of the first and largest Jewish choirs created anywhere, in what is now recognized as a nationwide movement.

“Jews across the country were creating community choirs as an expression of identity, pride, and creativity,” he said. “Kol Dodi was at the forefront of that larger movement of Jewish creativity and innovation” that led to the launching of the Zamir Choral Foundation’s North American Jewish Choral Festival, which Kol Dodi was invited to perform in during its first year — and where it has performed regularly since. As an up-and-coming amateur choir, “it was a great honor to be asked,” Cantor Caplan said, and through many subsequent appearances has always ranked “among the very best in performance.”

In its early years, Kol Dodi had between 75 to 80 singers; later years saw between 40 and 50, and now the number hovers around 35. While singers from Agudath Israel and Oheb Shalom made up the lion’s share of the first cohort, from the start, people came from throughout the MetroWest area and beyond. Cantor Caplan remembers one couple who “schlepped” from New Brunswick and a rabbi who traveled from Easton, Pa., to sing with Kol Dodi, because they “wanted a rich Jewish choir experience.”

They also came from throughout the Jewish spectrum — from synagogues across the denominations (even some Orthodox congregants who were not averse to singing in a mixed choir) and unaffiliated Jews who found in Kol Dodi a portal to the Jewish community.

The emphasis on the “non-audition” aspect of Kol Dodi was there from the beginning. “We wanted to create a Jewish choir experience that would be more open and welcoming, simply better for its members and for us as musicians,” Cantor Caplan said. It helps to have more people, “particularly with amateurs, so that the singers can benefit from hearing each other. It helps them retain the pitch.”

(Since no formal audition is required, does that mean anyone can join? Well, while most who approached the choir were self-selected and had some level of musical ability, Cantor Caplan did admit that “over the years, I have had to say to a few people, ‘Look, in order to play soccer, you have to be able to run; to be in a choir, you’ve got to be able to match pitch, and holding your own part is essential.’”)

While the singers were amateurs, the cantorial team directing and conducting and teaching them were highly professional. Both he and Cantor Lippitz “had a good amount of Jewish choral experience before we formed Kol Dodi,” Cantor Caplan said.

They both cited Matthew Lazar, founding director of the Zamir Choral Foundation and its various choral ensembles and the leader of the Jewish choral movement in North America, as an influence and inspiration. Mr. Lazar was Cantor Caplan’s teacher at the Jewish Theological Seminary’s H.L. Miller Cantorial School; later Cantor Caplan also taught there.

Both cantors had been active participants in and teachers at choral festival in their pre-Kol Dodi days and sang in, conducted, and directed other Jewish choral ensembles, at their own synagogues and beyond. They have sung with the New Jersey Cantors Concert Ensemble — which, according to its website, is the world’s first choir comprising both men and women cantors and which Cantor Caplan also led— and have been deeply involved in the Cantors Assembly, which, though affiliated with the Conservative movement, promotes the cantorate across the denominational spectrum. “The camaraderie and support of the Cantors Assembly has meant the world to me,” Cantor Lippitz said.

Cantor Caplan, who finished his tenure at Kol Dodi in 2013, just after its 20th anniversary, grew up in Iowa City, Iowa. In addition to his many musical and educational roles at Agudath Israel, he has led the HaZamir NJ Teen Choir, created choral arrangements of more than 100 Jewish songs, and toured Europe and America as part of the Zamir Chorale of Boston. He went to Moscow to teach refuseniks and to Israel to raise morale during the Iraqi Scud attacks. He served on the staff of Camp Ramah in the Berkshires.

Among the honors he has received are the Leo Brody Award for Outstanding Jewish Communal Service from the Conference on Jewish Communal Service of New Jersey. His musical prowess is expansive; he plays many instruments — clarinet, saxophone, recorder, flute, piano, guitar, harp, accordion, and fife.

Cantor Lippitz, who was among the first women JTS invested as a cantor in 1987, is a graduate of the University of Michigan School of Music and the Hornstein Program in Jewish Communal Service at Brandeis University.

Her life’s mission, she said, “has been to create caring communities with spirited music as their core.” In fulfillment of that aim, she was also co-founder of Voices in Harmony, the New Jersey interfaith choir, and for more than 10 years was a co-director of Shir Joy, a one-day festival for synagogue choirs. She recorded three albums as a member of the folk-singing group Beged Kefet, and she performed and recorded with Kol Sasson, Kol B’Seder, and Rabbi Joe Black. Among the awards she has received are the Cantors Assembly’s Yehudah Mandel Humanitarian Award and the Hazzan Moshe Nathanson Award for Conducting.

Such wide and deep exposure to the breadth of Jewish choral music meant the two cantors had abundant resources for formulating the Kol Dodi repertoire, while learning from each other about new pieces and obscure older works.

That repertoire has always been diverse; it includes Jewish liturgical pieces and popular songs in Hebrew, English, Yiddish, and Ladino, giving audiences a musical smorgasbord, with numbers from Israel, America, Europe, and beyond.

A revisit to the cantors’ “Top Five Composers of Jewish Choral Music,” which they provided in 2013, reveals the breadth of the repertoire, representing the arc of Jewish choral music over the centuries. It includes work by Renaissance composer Salamone Rossi (1570-1630) of Italy, who wrote music for the synagogue and whose sound of Jewish music was different from everyone who came before him; Louis Lewandowski (1821-1894), the first Jewish student accepted into the Berlin Academy of Arts and the first known synagogue choir master; Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990), who wrote “Jewish music at the highest level”; and Ben Steinberg (1930-2023), who played guitar with Richie Havens before turning to Jewish music as a writer of “serious classical music with a serious pop sound.”

Kol Dodi has performed at a host of prestigious venues, including Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, and has sung at the NAJCF many times, most memorably as part of the festival held in Jerusalem in 1996 to celebrate the city’s 3,000th anniversary. Performing on stage in the Jerusalem Theatre was “very beautiful and touching and loving,” Cantor Caplan said.

According to Cantor Ott, Kol Dodi’s artistic director, now is a good a time as any to honor its founders. Both she and Mr. Onigman credit Cantors Caplan and Lippitz for the formidable foundation that has sustained Kol Dodi through 34 years.

Cantor Anna West Ott, who was the chazan at Anshe Emeth Memorial Temple in New Brunswick from 1999 to 2020 and came to Kol Dodi as Cantor Lippitz was preparing to leave in 2020, said that through her own experience with many ensembles, both at her shul and as co-founder of Makhelat HaMercaz: Jewish Choir of Central Jersey and her own knowledge of Jewish music, she feels she was equipped to carry the torch.

“Joel and Riki were always receptive to a wide variety of music and open-minded in choosing their repertoire,” Cantor Ott said. “That made me comfortable and confident that they would approve of any new music I would bring to the group.”

She and Mr. Onigman said they were thrilled to be part of a Kol Dodi tribute to the two people who “left a legacy of love for Jewish music and for being Jewish, for singing with friends in an inspired community whose members want people to be lifted up by the words we sing.”

In honoring their predecessors, she and Mr. Onigman wanted “to make it a retrospective, so we chose some oldies, then included some new works, with input from Riki and Joel. They offered a few titles, then gave me and Matthew license to design the program.”

Kol Dodi singer Marcia Solkoff Eskin, who until two years ago served in the “fairly official” role as the choir’s technical administrator, also has been instrumental in planning the celebration. A longtime member of Oheb Shalom, and a close friend of Cantor Lippitz (whom she credits with recruiting her into Kol Dodi by exclaiming, “You sing! We are starting a choir!” when the cantor heard her chant a bit of her son’s bar mitzvah Torah portion). Ms. Eskin singled out Dave Schlossberg for the continued success of Kol Dodi; he is, she said, “much more than our accompanist. We refer to him as our collaborative keyboard artist. Dave is a composer of original music and choral arrangements. His original music is beautiful, and to me he has a special spirit and sophistication. At the concert, we will be singing two of his original compositions.”

Looking ahead to the concert and looking back at his time with Kol Dodi, Cantor Caplan said, “It was an honor and pleasure to make quality Jewish music together with so many members of our community. As much as anything, I was very touched by the loyalty of so many coming for rehearsals week after week. They have shown a wonderful devotion to Jewish music and life.”

Sharing the tribute with Cantor Lippitz, he said, “is a lovely, beautiful thing.”

Cantor Lippitz, who has informally immersed herself in Chicago’s Jewish music community, helping to create Shir Ruach, a Jewish community open sing, said leaving Kol Dodi “was exceptionally difficult, because I love them. But I am so grateful that the choir’s capable current directors have carried on and that they have recognized my ongoing relationship with them, which I’ve never severed.” When she is in the area, she tries to come to Kol Dodi rehearsals and “occasionally, they’ve even worked me into a concert

“Kol Dodi is above all a strong friendship group,” she continued. “It was formed to provide entertainment, but it recast the old, deadened image of a choral group into a vibrant community of people for whom music is their common language.” Over the years, Kol Dodi has provided “an important gateway into Jewish life for people not affiliated with synagogues at all. For them, Jewish music is their connection to Jewish peoplehood; to this day, many people call Kol Dodi their shul.”

She and Cantor Caplan “want to do everything in our power to ensure continued success of this most remarkable choir,” Cantor Lippitz said.

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Legacy of Love

“A Legacy of Love: Honoring our Founding Directors” will be held Thursday, June 5, at 7:30 p.m. at Congregation Agudath Israel in Caldwell. Kol Dodi will perform under the direction of Cantor Anna West Ott, artistic director; and Matthew Onigman, associate conductor; with accompanist Dave Schlossberg.

The program will include traditional pieces, Israeli and liturgical numbers, and popular and new compositions.

Among the works are two by Schlossberg, the group’s “collaborative keyboard artist”; “Dodi Li,” arranged by Cantor Lippitz and transcribed by Schlossberg; “Nigun Atik,” arranged by Cantor Caplan; and “Hatikvah Hanoshanah” by David Burger.

The audience will also hear some perennial favorites from Israel, including, “Yihye Tov” by David Broza and “Ani V’ata” by Arik Einstein and Miki Gavrielov.

Also represented on the program will be such musicians and composers as Leon Sher, Mordecai Seter, Charles Osborne, Heinrich Schenker, Stanley Sperber, and Abie Rotenberg.

Lippitz will conduct “Shir Hama’alot,” an original composition written by Mark Miller and commissioned in tribute to her by five chorus members, Marcia Eskin, Louise Karger, the late Dan Karger, and Murray and Randi Spiegel.

To hear Kol Dodi perform, go to youtube.com/user/KolDodiNJ.

The concert will be followed by a dessert reception.

Tickets cost $25, $18 for seniors and students; $30/$25 at the door; free for youngsters under 18. Sponsorships are available at a range of levels.

To order tickets or become a sponsor, go to zeffy.com/ticketing/june-concert; if you need help, email Erica at ejlotto@gmail.com.