How to pick up or brush up on synagogue skills

It can feel uncomfortable to be the odd one out; say, if you are a guest at a Friday night dinner and you are unable to join in the bensching because you don’t know the tunes. Or perhaps you are in synagogue wondering if you can keep up with the mourners as you grapple for the first time with the tongue-twisting Aramaic of the Rabbanan Kaddish.

Unfamiliarity with the liturgy is an obvious bar to participation and a sense of inclusion in a synagogue. Which is why the Masorti movement over the past couple of years has been compiling an online resource which can help novice worshippers to find their feet.

Shema Koleinu, “Hear Our Voice,” is a database of recordings of rituals and various parts of the traditional Siddur, from tefillin to the blessings for the haftarah and including the main prayers from Shabbat services.

Masorti heritage manager Rivka Gottlieb, herself an accomplished musician, said, “The lack of knowledge of tefillah [prayer] was stopping people’s engagement in communal life.

“We are trying to fill a gap for the Jew in the pew. It’s your average community member who goes to shul occasionally or even regular people who have gaps in their knowledge and want to fill those.

“What this does is to provide the reinforcement and the resources for people who are perhaps a little shy or embarrassed as well to start learning and listening and becoming more familiar at home.”

Spreading knowledge of the service: Masorti Heritage manager Rivka Gottlieb[Missing Credit]

But it is designed not only to provide an entrée into the traditional service but also to encourage more experienced congregants to acquire the know-how to lead prayers. And since Masorti prides itself on its DIY spirit and has a number of groups without a full-time rabbi, having lay people who are confident to mount the bimah is an asset. If you want to know how to call someone up to the Torah, for example, you can go to the site and listen how to do it.

“The idea is to increase engagement wherever people are at, so they can take that step further,” she said.

The site can be used not only by bnei mitzvah children who want to practise their skills but by parents who want to support them.

A significant helping hand came in the form of a £100,000 grant for the project from the Lottery Heritage Fund. Not only has it primed the creation of the website but also supported the second aspect of the programme, to provide courses and congregational workshops.

Tutors include Cantor Rebecca Blumenthal, known as Cantor Bex, a teacher for the European Academy of Jewish Liturgy, who works with Oxford Hebrew Congregation, where there is a Masorti group.

Shema Koleinu has, for example, run three leyning courses attended in all by several dozen people. Its workshops are tailored to the specific needs of the individual community.

The movement is adding to the site all the time although with the Lottery grant now spent, its expansion depends on securing funding. One congregant has sponsored the recording of all the yearly haftarot which will be added in due course.

There may be other sites with a similar objective but these are not always easy to navigate, Gottlieb said, and a key aim was to make Shema Koleinu “super-accessible”. It includes a glossary of common shul terms.

Musical tutors: Yoav Oved and Ayala Gottlieb Alter[Missing Credit]

While New North London Synagogue, where she previously worked, had a “nice array” of its own recordings, she said, these were rather “homespun”.

What is different about Shema Koleinu is that “the recordings are of a high quality, they are professionally produced and the people doing the singing are… actually all training to be chazanim. They are all professional singers so they have really good pitch which makes it easier for people to learn.”

And it differs from Orthodox options in its egalitarian principles. Each section is recorded by both a man and a woman so the student can choose their virtual mentor. One of the singers is Gottlieb’s own daughter Ayala, who is a cantorial student with Ejal and recently completed a spell as temporary cantor at the Great Synagogue in Stockholm.

The programme also supports weekly courses for the Masorti youth group Noam. Martha Limburg, now the movement’s director of communities, said, “We are teaching them about prayer on that course. On camp prayer is such a big part and the kids come away so engaged and we want to keep them like that.”

Gottlieb added, “Ayala’s earliest memory of tefillah is at Noam and her most moving experiences have been at Noam, and I think that is true with a lot of kids.”

As well as strengthening people’s connections with the conventions of synagogue life, the project is about deepening appreciation of Anglo-Jewry’s heritage of liturgical music.

“It is about preserving what we do today and passing it on,” Gottlieb said. “We’ll have a section with historic recordings as well and I hope that people will send me the recordings that they have of treasured memories and treasured teachers.”

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Shema Koleinu is at masortiprayer.org.uk